Make War, Not Love?
How we got the story of sex wrong for Christian men. On the two-year launch anniversary of THE SEX TALK YOU NEVER GOT
“He wants a release. He wants to make me orgasm. He wants excitement. He is chasing a fantasy. He is hungry (or perhaps anxious) for an endgame. When he is on a mission, pushing for an outcome, he isn’t present. He misses things. He doesn’t really see me. He is un-attuned. Distracted.” Lilia Ever
“The kind of core issue with girls was that they were being cut off from their bodies. With boys, it felt like they were being cut off from their hearts.” Peggy Orenstein, journalist on sexuality among young adults
Maybe the greatest risk I took in writing a book for men about sex was telling men we’ve all lost the lover within. What’s so edgy about that? Because I called men lovers. My publisher even hesitated at that language, thinking it would turn men away, because its sounds too un-masculine. And it goes against the primary story of sex among Christian men.
To Christian men, sexuality is a war. Lust is every man’s battle. Therefore, what your sexuality needs is a warrior, not a lover. You need to fight lust and sexual temptation. The difficulty is this posture can make sexuality itself the enemy. It invites you to relate to your sexuality with suspicion. Be alert to any immodesty around you, yes, but also cautious of everything that moves in you.
Even sex in marriage gets scripted, not as the intimate overflow of emotional connection, but something a man needs in his battle with lust. Regular sex protects men from temptation. That’s how wives help fight. Or the story goes that men are out there working hard, warring against the world, and need sex as a salve for the battle scars. Sex is not both lovers swaying in mutual closeness and play after both working hard, but something a woman gives a
man for all his hard work out there. Its a way to be merciful to the working warrior and re-inflate him.
Warrior energy sexuality
What does all this warrior energy do to the sexuality of men and to the women that love them? What happens when all that fear and hypervigilence and defensive posture commingles with your sexuality?
That was a major problem I saw with men in my counseling practice. Men only knew how to talk about their sexuality from a warrior perspective. Am I defeating lust? Behaving or not behaving? And am I getting the sex I need to survive? It all had an urgency. And the deeper infrastructure and complexity and glory of their bodies and hearts seemed left out of the story. They did not seem aware of the entire superpower available to their sexuality: The nuance and skill of their intuitive relational self, the ability to risk vulnerability, to feel, to connect deeply, and the courage to be in awe, to be overpowered and undone by beauty. They also had little awareness of their sexual origin story and how it sexually formed them.
I became convinced that battle is a really damaging metanarrative for sex. It neglects a man’s other half, the part that most men have disowned and pushed into the shadows of their being: the Lover within.
Men in two parts
Early in the process of writing my book, God kept giving me hints and clues about the direction to go. A man read me this poem from Alaskan poet John Haines to describe the divide within himself. And there it was clear as day—the warrior out front, the tender lover buried within.
Divided, The Man Dreaming
“One half
lives in sunlight; he is
the hunter and calls
the beasts of the field
about him.
Bathed in sweat and tumult
he slakes and kills,
eats meat
and knows blood.
His other half
lies in shadow
and longs for stillness,
a corner of the evening
where birds
rest from flight:
cool grass grows at his feet,
dark mice feed
from his hands.”
When God placed Adam in the garden of Eden, it was to “…to cultivate it and guard it.” (Genesis 2:15 GNT). To guard in Hebrew means to keep or protect, as in the protection of a valuable thing. It elsewhere refers to a priest keeping commandments or a warrior guarding a king. It calls for strength of person and character. Warrior energy. But God also charged Adam to cultivate the garden. The Hebrew means to till and plant as a farmer, but implies a lesser position, as a servant, vassal care taker, or humble worshipper. It’s translated other places almost exclusively as serving or worshipping.
This two-fold call is not unique to Adam alone. It mirrors God’s call in the poetry of Genesis 1, for man and woman to be “fruitful and fill” and “rule and subdue” (v28). The image here is of a king and queen called together to be cultivators and protectors. Warriors and lovers. We need both of these to engage our world. And we absolutely need both in stewarding our sexuality.
You need to guard your sexuality, so to speak, to keep watch over it. This is where sexual purity or fidelity plays in. This is where you resist temptation and fight shame. The Bible does call us to flee sexual immorality (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5). But fleeing has a different tone than fighting. We de-escalate the battle. And notice in the dual call to Adam and Eve, sexuality falls more under the fruitful, cultivating side of us, versus the ruling and guarding side of us. That’s where it best belongs.
As men, I think we miss the cultivator/worshipper/creative lover side of us. And we suffer for it.
Your sexuality needs the lover
Just about everything your sexuality may need, from a better sex life to victory over porn, comes from the intuitive lover within. Not the warrior.
Sex from warrior strength is inherently unerotic. It’s urgent and rushed and pushy. The lover integrates with his body in a more congruent way. He’s more in the moment, not driven by an agenda. He cultivates connection, tills the soil of intimacy with the woman he loves by asking curious questions and sharing from his heart. To him, vulnerability is thrilling. It enhances connection and pleasure. The lover has no problem being overpowered by the beauty and glory of another and enjoys serving from a humble position. I dare say that could revolutionize all our sex lives.
Or take a struggle with porn or lust: yes, a man will absolutely need the focus and discipline of the warrior to resist lust and guard his sexuality. But many men stop there, not realizing that most porn or lust struggles arise from emotional triggers, not sexual ones. He believes it’s his over-active sex drive instead of his over-active (hypervigilant) nervous system. It’s absolutely more true that he needs to tune into his own body, story, and emotional well-being. Those are the places he faces the greatest temptation. And that’s lover work.
“Men want sex and women want romance.” “The wedding is for the bride and the wedding night for the groom.” Ever heard stuff like this before? This is an insult to every man and woman alive because it degrades both.
Think about our God given sex education book—the Song of Songs. God did not give us a health class anatomy book on sex. Instead, he gave us a collection of erotic poems—what Biblical scholar Tremper Longman calls the erotic psalter. It’s the book we never know what to do with so we quickly make it allegory. But its first intent is to educate us on erotic love. God wanted us to learn something about sexual passion by beholding these lovers.
Lesson number one is this: These two lovers are deeply in love. They both really love each others' body and they really love writing love poetry. In other words, the man and the woman are both romantic and sexual. We got it really, really wrong to split these along gender lines. Men are no less capable of deep emotional attachment. Women are no less capable of sexual desire or pleasure. Person to person, there may be differences, but we are equally made for sex and romance.
To be human is to be a lover. Sex has a heart. The sky is blue and sex is for lovers.
Show me the lover
So what does a lover look like or sound like? I’ve heard men moving with lover energy most recently in music. Let me introduce you to a few.
Jon Bellion wrote a song to his wife called Overwhelming. That may sound like an insult. Since when is overwhelming a compliment? But Jon’s got the lover in spades in this song and he means it every bit as a blessing (I wrote this whole article with this song on repeat). Here’s a sampling:
“Everything about you is so overwhelming When I think about you, it gets overwhelming 'Cause everything about you is so overwhelming Come over here and overwhelm me”
Being overwhelmed is a really bad thing for a warrior. Warriors live by command and control. But to a lover, overwhelm is amazing. Overwhelm is a sign of awe. And awe requires vulnerability. A lover knows the pleasure of being overpowered and undone.
Here’s another song I heard in Starbucks a few months back from Alec Benjamin called Different Kind of Beautiful.
“You're a different kind of beautiful The kind that makes me scared The kind that makes me turn around and act like I'm not there The kind that takes my breath away and leaves me without air Maybe I'm delusional You're just that kind of beautiful”
Beauty that makes someone scared? Again, to a warrior, fear is the enemy. In love, in the right dose (not abusive terror), it’s really the presence of vulnerability. It’s the heart letting itself be moved and again overpowered by the glory of another.
Join the revolution
Want to hear something wildly encouraging? This month The Sex Talk You Never Got celebrates two years in the world. And after selling close to 25,000 copies and hearing so many messages from you all, one thing is clear: you get it! Men got the mission. Men have resonated very deeply with reclaiming the lover within. That should encourage all of us. I am so glad my publisher took a risk with me. My greatest prayer with this book was for God to start a revolution of lovers in the world, in marriages, in dating relationships, indeed, in my very own heart. May God bless the lover within you too.
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So good, Sam. Congrats on two years since launch and thanks for all your good work.
Sam, this post felt like familiar territory as it led me into beautiful memories. My late husband told me, "I never knew what I was missing before us. Looking back I recognize I have been a partner but until us I'd never been a lover".